New rental concept comes to Vallejo, Vacaville

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Linh Pham opens the shades that cover the dining room window, to reveal the view in the Glen Cove area of Vallejo home her company Copious Living is offering to rent four bedrooms in to create a relatively affordable rental option with pre-screened housemates.
(Rachel Raskin-Zrihen — Times-Herald)

Copious Living means living lots, or living plenty, the new Solano County-based business’ owners said, and that’s what they seek to provide in an out-of-the-box sort-of solution to the Bay Area’s housing crunch.

Copious Living’s owner William Yeh said he and his partners are offering two properties presently – one in Vallejo and one in Vacaville – and are renting out the bedrooms, to create housemate situations for less than the cost of an average apartment. Though dealing in local real estate since 2003, Copious has only been in business a few months, he said.

“We have seen a lot of difficulties for single independent adults looking for a place to live,” company spokeswoman Linh Pham said. “Rents are too expensive. So our company has decided to offer our two homes, which are furnished, except for the bedrooms – so, that’s one thing (new renters) don’t have to worry about.”

This concept is already making headway in some of the larger cities in the South Bay, East Bay and San Francisco, New York and elsewhere, Pham said.

“We hope to expand into other areas of Solano County,” she said. “We’re first in Solano County, and this is like a trial phase.”

The average monthly rent in Vallejo and Vacaville for a basic one bedroom, one bath apartment is about $1,522, and that is just for the four walls, Copious owners said in a press release.

“Furnishing it and setting up all the utilities and other features we now consider necessary for a comfortable life, like cable and high-speed internet,” and the expense and time consumed, really add up, they said. Copious handles all that, they said.

The view from the kitchen of the Glen Cove home that officials from Copious Living hope to rent out the four bedrooms of.(Rachel Raskin-Zrihen — Times-Herald)

The San Francisco-based ApartmentList.com’s latest Bay Area rental report, released Friday, seems to bear out Copious’ officials hypothesis.

Median rent prices in Solano County are less affordable than comparable cities nationwide, with Vallejo’s median two-bedroom rent of $1,400 being above the national average of $1,180, it says.

“Over the past year, rent increases have been occurring not just in the city of Vallejo, but across the entire state – of the largest 10 cities that we have data for in California, all of them have seen prices rise,” ApartmentList officials said.

Rooms in the Copious Vallejo rental – atop a hill in the Glen Cove area – rent for between $1,095 and $1,595 per month,Yeh said.

The owners think this is a concept whose time has come.

“Once the concept is proven, we intend to lease other properties from unaffiliated third parties, fix them up and rent them out,” Yeh said. “We want to address the cost of single bedroom apartments, the prices of which continue to rise.”

The company enforces a set of common rules, and housemates can add their own, as long as they break no laws, Yeh said. Also, should irreconcilable differences emerge, housemates can transfer to other properties in the network without breaking their lease, Yeh said.

For more information, contact 925-331-8155, ttanner@livecopious.com,or apply at https://home.cozy.co/apply#!581906

With the Times-Herald since 1999, Rachel Raskin-Zrihen has been a reporter, writer and columnist for several print and online publications for nearly 30 years. She is the married mother of two grown sons and lives locally.